CHAPTER I. 



THE DUTCH GRAND FISHERY; JAMES I; MARE LIBERUM 

 AND DOMINIUM MARIS. 



THE history of the Royal Fishery Companies of England 

 is the history of a series of attempts made during the seven- 

 teenth century by the sovereigns of Britain to unite English 

 and Scotch noblemen, gentlemen of private means, mer- 

 chants and fishermen in an enterprise which had for its 

 ultimate object the ousting of the Dutch from the position 

 of pre-eminence in the North Sea which the Hollanders 

 enjoyed as the result of centuries of strenuous toil and 

 untiring enterprise.^) Recognising from the first its national 

 importance to a maritime people, the Dutch, with dogged 

 perseverance, had striven to develop the fishing industry, 

 and with such success as made their fisheries at once the 

 envy and the inspiration of all those who, in various ways, 

 laboured in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to 

 establish Britain as a sea power. Roused to action by the 

 success of the Dutch, numerous public-spirited pamphle- 

 teers wrote with the intention of impressing upon the British 

 people the fact that the Hollanders were fast becoming a 

 great maritime power through the wealth derived from the 

 exploitation of those resources of the North Sea fisheries 

 which Britain had so long neglected. That British jealousy 

 of the Dutch which is such a factor in the foreign policy of 

 Britain during the seventeenth century, sprang in no small 

 measure from the growing knowledge of the wealth derived 



